Tag : prostate

Everyone seems to agree that prevention of disease is critically important, but most of what doctors do under the heading of preventive care is not prevention, it’s really just early diagnosis.

Pap smears and mammograms don’t prevent breast and cervical cancer; they help us diagnose them early. Prostate exams, chest x-rays, and your annual physical don’t prevent disease, they help us find it early. It is possible not to have a disease, but still be weak, tired, and overweight, while robust good health means being fast, strong, lean, smart, and sexy.

But fast, strong, lean, smart, and sexy pretty much define optimal health, and optimal health requires you and your doctor working together to change your lifestyle, enhance your diet and supplements, move your hormones back to a robust youthful level, and boost your immune system. This is the direction I think medicine should be moving.

A recent study followed a series of men who had been diagnosed with localized prostate cancer. One half of the men were given 4000 units of vitamin D daily for a year and the other half were not. At the end of the year, 55% of the group that received the vitamin D had less prostate cancer found on their biopsies.In the group that did not receive the vitamin D, 65% of the men were found to have increased amounts of prostate cancer in their biopsies.

This does not say that vitamin D will cure your prostate cancer. But there is a significant chance it might slow its

One of the common therapies used in prostate cancer are drugs that interfere with a man’s production of testosterone. While this does slow tumor growth, there is a downside.

With low testosterone men are at higher risk of forming blood clots in their legs, lungs and brain, not to mention sexual dysfunction, depression and chronic fatigue. As a consequence, many men end up taking anticoagulants to prevent those blood clots.

An interesting paper just published shows that men who use anticoagulants have significantly better survival from their cancers than men who do not need these drugs. This intriguing bit of data is causing researchers to take a look at the anticoagulants, such as warfarin and heparin, to see if they might have anti-cancer properties that have not previously been recognized.

Once more, studies designed to look at one thing, raise more intriguing new questions than they answer.

A recent study of prostate cancer, funded by the federal government, linked high cholesterol levels with doubling the risk of developing an aggressive cancer that is more likely to result in death. The study, which involved over 6000 men, showed there was a clear correlation between a cholesterol level over 200 and a doubling in the incidence of high-grade malignancies of the prostate. As a result, some have leapt to the conclusion that placing men on statin drugs, which are a class of drugs that lower cholesterol levels, should lower the risk of prostate cancer (or at least lower the risk of high-grade aggressive prostate cancer).

I wish life was that straight forward, but the data on statin use and prostate cancer incidence is complex. There are studies indicating that long-term use of statin drugs may decrease the overall risk of prostate cancer to some modest degree. On the other hand, a large study, published in September of 2009 and done here at the Seattle Fred